AFK Journey Talk with Designers: Homestead Updates, Season Systems, PvP, and Future Plans

With the launch of Homestead’s exciting new feature and the anticipation of the upcoming season, we’ve been busy gathering valuable feedback from magisters. In this article, we are thrilled to share insightful perspectives and thoughts, offering a comprehensive look at what these changes mean for the community.

Q: Will there be new Homestead features in the future?

Absolutely. We’ll be expanding the Homestead system with both event-based and social features. In fact, new event content is already in production. Features like message boards, a dedicated Homestead chat channel, and the Homestead photo mode will roll out over the next one or two updates. Next season will also introduce a full batch of new Homestead content, along with quality-of-life features such as a Homestead-sharing system that’s already in the pipelines.

Since the Homestead system went live, we’ve received lots of player feedback, especially requests for a “crop stealing” feature. We’ll be discussing this internally and aim to deliver something that players will enjoy as soon as possible. Overall, the Homestead system will focus on DIY customization, with fun and social interaction at the core of our design philosophy. We’ll keep listening to your feedback, improving the Homestead system, and adding more Homestead-related events over time.

Q: The phased structure this season has had mixed feedback, and AFK Challenge feels like too much of a grind. Will that change?

The phased structure was our first attempt to fix pacing issues from earlier seasons. It’s a new approach, so it’s no surprise that some parts didn’t work as well as we’d hoped. Our approach moving forward is to iterate on existing gameplay and add new features and content—because keeping the game fresh and genuinely fun is what will keep players engaged. Here’s our plan:

• Every one or two seasons, we’ll refresh the progression path to keep both leveling and combat encounters feeling fresh.
• Over the coming seasons, we’ll test and iterate new gameplay modes to ensure they’re fun to play. We’ll talk more about this later.

We’ll keep an eye on whether players are progressing through the season at the pace we expect, and we’ll adjust based on feedback. For example, in Phase 3 of this season, we made optimizations to reduce grind. We’re aware that as new gameplay is added, the AFK system will need to become less grindy. In future updates, we plan to introduce background AFK for Legend Trial, and even offline AFK, so you’ll have more free time to enjoy new gameplay. At the same time, if the overall pacing works well, we intend to keep going in that direction and put more effort into designing new modes, such as the recently launched simulation gameplay. We believe this will provide players with a better experience than frequently changing the season rules.

Q: A lot of heroes still aren’t viable or get much use, even after reaching Enhance Force level 2. What do you plan to do about that?

Making more heroes relevant will be a key focus in future gameplay design. For example, in our internal tests, changing the boss fight objective from “deal as much damage as possible” to “defeat a fixed-HP boss as fast as you can” completely changes the meta, affecting which heroes and strategies work best. We’re exploring more ideas like this, and over the next one to two seasons, we’ll be adding new modes to keep lineup-building and combat feeling fresh. We’re careful when deciding which heroes get a second enhancement and what the enhancement effects should be. On one hand, we want those heroes to be useful in certain situations or team setups; on the other, we don’t want players who don’t own those heroes to feel pressured. We also look at whether each hero’s design is a good fit for that kind of upgrade. We have more second enhancements planned for next season, and we’ll be taking all of your feedback into account.

Q: What’s next for the talent and accessory systems?

Next season, the talent system is getting a major update. The current prime carrier mechanic will be replaced with something entirely new, and outside of combat, there’ll be a completely new free progression path. The goal is to give you new ways to have fun, discover new strategies, and experiment with different builds. We also plan to rework the accessory system, but that update will likely come in a later season.

Q: The Arena feels stale. Will there be changes to gameplay or rewards?

Yes. We’re planning to add limited-time events to shake up the whole Arena gameplay. One idea in the works is a cross-server PvP mode built on top of the existing Supreme Arena. This mode will cater to top PvP players in each server, while still giving casual players the chance to take part, have fun, and earn rewards. We want Arena fans to have more ways to play and enjoy themselves. Of course, these limited-time events will also come with extra rewards.

Q: Could we get a sparring mode for the regular Arena?

The original goal of the sparring mode was to give players a low-stakes environment to practice PvP battles. But it hasn’t been updated in a while and isn’t doing its job. We’ll be optimizing it in future seasons to add more relevant features, so you can practice under different simulated PvP environments.

Q: Will there be new PvP modes?

Yes. You’ve probably noticed that we’ve been experimenting with different PvP modes recently, like Melon Melee and Sunlit Showdown. While the latest Sunlit Showdown event still follows a PvE format, we think players who tried it can imagine how exciting it would be to face real opponents. That’s exactly the direction we’ll be exploring in future updates.

Q: Will server transfers be possible?

We’ve been thinking about a server transfer system for a long time. In our initial plan, we designed several safeguards to protect each server’s ecosystem. These include, but aren’t limited to, limiting the power of transferred players and restricting which servers they can move to. This helps prevent high-level players from disrupting server rankings. Also, after transferring in, a player won’t take up a ranking reward slot for a set period of time (though they can still earn the rewards themselves, similar to a tied ranking system). Even with those safeguards, there were still bigger challenges, like the risk of more servers becoming inactive, or upsetting the balance between Guilds, which would be hard to fully prevent. Because of these concerns, we decided to discontinue the project in the final stages.

Instead of adding a server transfer system, we want to fix the root problem: when a server’s population drops, Guilds can’t recruit enough members and active players struggle to find the right Guild. Most of our social features already work across servers, so the real limitation is with Guilds. Our solution is to introduce cross-server guilds with safeguard rules, so core systems like personal rankings remain unaffected while letting players team up and socialize freely across servers. This still comes with some challenges, but they’re far easier to handle than single-player server transfers.

Q: When will the next crossover event happen, and which characters will be featured?

We can’t disclose the exact timing or characters yet due to our contract with the IP partner. What we can reveal is that there will be crossover events in both the next season and the one after that, and they’ll fit our game’s style perfectly.

Q: Are there any other new features or modes in development?

First, we’ll keep maintaining and updating the game modes we already have. For example, the new simulation mode that just launched will keep getting optimized and expanded with each season. We’ll also revisit older modes that players once enjoyed but have grown tired of, such as Battle Drills and Crystal Clash, and give them major updates to bring the fun back. Next season, we’ll also be trying a large-scale multiplayer PvE event that’s closely tied to the main story and set in the open world. If it’s well received, we may rebuild the current Battle Drills GvE experience around it. This would let us replace older content with something more exciting and rewarding, without increasing the grind. Looking ahead, our aim is that after one or two seasons of testing and iteration, all seasonal gameplay will be linked together into one clear progression path.